Students Disillusioned at Lower Admissions Standards, Easier Coursework for Minorities

Bruce Fleming is not your typical US Naval Academy (USNA) Professor. He teaches English and he also happens to be a liberal. I’ve written favorably in my books about his work because he also happens to believe in speaking the truth. And by speaking the truth about the dirty secrets of affirmative action at the Naval Academy, he has set off a fire storm.

Fleming wrote a piece last year exposing the fact that the USNA had a “two-tiered” system of admission that was designed to bring more minorities into the academy. (Since access to the full article has expired, reporting on the article is available here.) And he began speaking to academy alumni about the lower standards. ”We’ll do anything to get non-white students,” he said, in order to appear more diverse and improve the football team. According to Fleming, the admissions system is two-tiered because minority candidates have lower test scores and grades than their counterparts. In short, Fleming says that the Academy is rejecting better qualified white applicants to admit minority candidates with less impressive credentials. The USNA has been very aggressive on the affirmative action front in recent years. In 2009, Adm. Gary Roughead, the chief of naval operations, went so far as to say that “diversity is the No. 1 priority” at the academy. (Gee, I guess training warriors and officers is now #2).

But Fleming, who has served on the academy’s admissions board, goes even further. While white applicants are required to secure a nomination by a member of congress or other federal official, minority candidates are sometimes given what he calls “a pro forma nomination to make it legit.”

But it gets even worse. As the Associated Press reports:

“Fleming told The Associated Press that midshipmen who struggle are given easier coursework or unlimited tutoring, breeding resentment among students who expected to get a first-rate education along with their military training. The environment is particularly toxic for talented black midshipmen, he said, because they are perceived by some classmates as less-qualified.

‘My students are disillusioned beyond belief,’ Fleming said. ‘They see people being coddled for political reasons or racial reasons or sports reasons.’

The result, he said, is a watered-down officer corps that weakens the military. Navy leaders haven’t fully articulated their reasoning for wanting more minority officers, he said.

‘What I hear is, what the enlisted people want is an officer who won’t get them killed,’ he said.”

The Navy apparently doesn’t care for Fleming’s honesty. Even though he was recommended for a merit pay increase by his supervisors, it was denied by the Navy brass. So Fleming filed a complaint. While he cannot discuss the details, he says that he is very satisfied with the result.

I had precious few professors like Fleming when I went to college. I wish I had more. Bravo to Fleming for speaking the truth. Hopefully his efforts will help to restore the highest standards to the USNA.

How about it white man? Are we divisible? Is diversity what you value? Or do you value achievement & personal responsibility? Do you value your familty and our ancestors? Do you value the nation they help to set up and preserve or are we going to let it die?

Stand up White man!

One Nation, Indivisible
Fifteen years ago, the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit flouted Supreme Court law when it struck down affirmative action at the University of Texas Law School. Last week, in an act of redemption, the appellate court upheld an admissions plan for undergraduates at the University of Texas at Austin that takes race into account to encourage diversity. The plan was adopted after the Supreme Court again approved affirmative action in higher education in 2003.

Like many other universities, the University of Texas values diversity’s many educational benefits. Students educated in a diverse university are better prepared for a diverse work force and for helping bring about what the Supreme Court called the dream of “one nation, indivisible.”

When the Fifth Circuit said the university couldn’t consider race in admissions in 1996, Texas passed the Top 10 Percent Law that used geographic diversity as a proxy for race. Any resident graduating in the top tenth of a high school class is assured admission to a state university. Four-fifths of the places in each University of Texas at Austin class have been for Top 10 students.

The annual MLK observance at the state house in Columbia SC had an interesting twist this year. The event is held on the north side steps of the statehouse. Prominent at that location is a large bronze statue of George Washington. This year, the NAACP constructed a “box” to conceal the Father of His Country from view so that participants would not be offended by his presence.

Howard Dean says that the Tea Party movement is the ‘last gasp’ of the generation that ‘has trouble with diversity.’

Speaking at a Monitor-sponsored breakfast for reporters, Mr. Dean said “the fundamental driver is the economy. I think the unsaid issue that nobody wants to talk about is – and the Republicans get really upset when I mention this – is the demographic changes. There is no question about that.”

Dean called the tea party movement, “the last gasp of the generation that has trouble with diversity.”He argued that, “The demographic changes we have all known were going to happen have happened and all of a sudden it is here for them and they don’t know what to do…. Every morning when they see the president, they are reminded that things are totally different than they were when they were born.”

The former Vermont governor and presidential candidate said he tells college audiences that, “you have all had friends of different races, different religions, and different sexual orientations, and you all date each other, that is not how I grew up. That is not how the tea party grew up. The tea party is almost entirely over 55 and white.”

Well, Howard, let’s talk about those demographic changes. Remarkably few politicians (or anyone in public life) wants to talk about those changes. And I am not surprised that Republicans ‘get really upset’ when you mention it. They probably get upset because they will have to recite their ”I’m not a racist” mantra again, and they surely get tired of it, because they feel they ”have to” do it so often. They can’t seem to get it through their thick heads that they don’t ”have to” do their little PC dance whenever someone plays the race card or hints at ‘racism’ on the part of Republicans.

The Republicans may not like to talk about those changes, but I would very much like to talk about those changes, and I would talk about them with any honest liberal, be he Democrat or Republican, that I come across. The trouble is, I don’t meet any honest liberal of any persuasion. They are generally not honest people and they cannot be reasoned with or confronted for a frank and open discussion. No, they simply want to call names and hurl personal insults and accusations.

So maybe that’s why, Howard, you don’t find many who want to talk about it with you.

I’ve been talking about it here for several years now, and I talk about it with anybody in real life who will converse with me in good faith, and some who won’t. Some people are made uncomfortable by my perspective, but then that’s their problem. I do nothing more than speak the truth and express honest feelings about those ‘demographic changes’ you speak about with such a cavalier air.

And how about those demographic changes that have been so relentlessly engineered for the last several decades, Howard? Are you and your ilk proud that you have put one over on the White American majority? Or do you get together and have a good old laugh amongst yourselves like the ‘happy traitors’ in the photo from 2006 at the top of this blog post? Or do you all high-five each other, as Fredo Arias-King, a Mexican political aide, said our politicians did, when pondering the Latinoization of the USA?

But you speak of those changes as if they were some sort of natural occurrence or phenomenon, rather than the deliberate policy inflicted on us in the most underhanded fashion, in contravention of our American belief that the people are the rightful repository of power.

Your counterparts in the UK were caught a while back in discussing how they would accelerate demographic changes in their country, and spoke of how they would ‘rub the right wing’s noses in diversity.’ Tell me that does not reflect an intentional policy.

What is happening to this country is that it has been stolen out from under us, and appropriated by unseen others, for whom you and your kind are errand boys. These unseen others have decided to ‘elect a new population,’, and to go over our heads in making plans for this country, our country. They have decided that this will no longer be what it was at its beginning, a country of Anglo-Protestant origin, created for the posterity of our English forefathers, as they specified. When they said ”our posterity”, they did not mean the posterity of any human being on the planet, but their own progeny. You yourself, Howard, are a descendant of founding stock English colonial settlers, a fact which makes me ashamed, as I too come from that stock. People like you, Howard, feed the stereotype that Anglo-Saxon Americans are often effete traitors to this country and its people.

So I am of that generation you disparage which has (I will not deny it) a ”problem with diversity.” Maybe those of us who have ”trouble with diversity” have such a problem because diversity itself is troublesome.

Ask the people of Japan if they would care to have Japan swamped by non-Japanese, especially by people with whom they have no ethnic kinship. Ask the people of Mexico, who are notoriously ethnocentric and ‘xenophobic’ because they throw illegal immigrants out of their country.

But we, we of the historically White Christian countries alone, are supposed to have no objections when this country is sold out from under us, without our consent, without so much as a ‘by-your-leave.’ Where is this democracy and freedom your kind talk about, Howard? Why do we not have a national referendum on mass immigration? Where is our voice? Where is our representation? No one, except for a very few, consults us or speaks for us. Instead, they studiously ignore immigration except when they are pandering to Hispanics or others.

I have a problem with ‘diversity’ because of the way in which it has been foisted on us, with no recognition of our rights, our needs, our wishes, our concerns. You have gone over our heads and imposed it on us from above, with no input from us. That is wrong.

And yes, I have a huge problem with that. What’s more, I have a huge problem with anyone who doesn’t have a problem with that.

And I have trouble with diversity in that it generates troubles by its very nature. Explain to me why it is that every place which is ‘diverse’ ends up deteriorating in every possible way. This seems to be an ironclad rule. ‘Diversity’ always brings decaying neighborhoods, less community and more alienation, more garbage and litter, worse schools, higher taxes, and eventually displacement of the long-time residents. You call this ”white flight” and decry it as evidence of ‘racism.’ But it is nothing more than a reasonable response to the destruction of our neighborhoods and towns by your much-prized ‘diversity.’

Even if every immigrant was a paragon of virtue, the fact remains when you replace Americans with say, Somalis or Salvadoreans or Hindus or Chinese, you change the place into something else entirely. And you destroy one more piece of what was a historic, distinct place, with a distinct people, a place we called America.

And you have the gall to tell us we have to ”celebrate” this transmutation, and to call it a good thing.

As for me, I won’t defensively plead that I am not a bigot or a xenophobe or whatever other name your sort use to bludgeon me. I like my people. I liked the country I was born into, though it is long since gone, thanks to your lust for ‘diversity.’ What right have you, or what right has anyone to change it beyond recognition, and to put some inferior and tawdry counterfeit in its place, and tell me I must like it?

And the Tea Party? That group will probably go on pleading their innocence of ‘racism’ and promoting diversity, which is just what you want. You want to emasculate any opposition and to render them sufficiently politically correct so that they will be no threat to you and your masters to whom diversity is so all-fired important. They may, however, wake up and stop dancing to your tune. Don’t celebrate our demise just yet.